Tag Archives: discrimination

Code Anthem’s Donâ€™t Judge a Developer by Open Source (via Meg in the Open Thread) argues that companies that rely on Open Source coding contributions as a hiring criterion are both demanding a lot of their hiree’s free time and are sexist:

Open source is a culture. There are plenty of smart and passionate developers out there who are not part of that culture. And certainly there are plenty of dumb and curmudgeonly developers out there participating in open source…. There are there smarter ways to spend your time. The stereotypical open source developer works for a bumbling corporate during the day, doing dull work (but necessary to make money) and then comes home to work on his passion, OpenOKHRWUJ Framework…

Requiring open source contributions is sexist… Open source is dominated by men even more so than the programming community as a whole… itâ€™s irresponsible to require your new hire developers to come from a male-oriented pool. Alasâ€¦ â€œUnderrepresentation breeds underrepresentationâ€.

I have a comment in moderation there in which I say that I think the stereotype is incorrect: that Open Source developers in my experience are either university students or other young people with a lot of free time, or they’re paid Open Source developers. (I know hobbyist Open Source coders with unrelated dev or other full-time jobs too, yes, but not nearly so many and their contributions are for obvious reasons usually not as significant. If nothing else, this group has a really high incidence of typing injuries.)

But that’s a side-note: I think the core point of the post stands. Open Source is very male-dominated, is known for being unpleasantly sexist, and is also a subculture whose norms (even where neutral as regards sexism) don’t fit everyone. Requiring these norms feeds right into the problem talked about in Being Inclusive vs Not Being Exclusive:

People who come from underprivileged minorities are usually very experienced in the art of being excluded. Sometimes it’s overt – “we don’t like your kind” – but many times it’s subtle. They’re told that they’re “not quite right”, or they “don’t have the right look”, or “don’t have the right experience”, or just aren’t told anything. At the same time, they are surrounded by all sorts of imagery and communique about how they don’t quite belong, about how they have to change themselves to fit in, about how they are undesirable. They do not see a lot of examples they can relate to; even the ones that come close tend to stick out for being “Exotic”, being a token. They already have a lot of barriers against them and are already of the mind that they’ll more likely be rejected than accepted.

If you insist on a lot of experience in a particular male-dominated sub-culture as a prerequisite for a job, that reads as “we prefer [a subset of] men, basically, or at least people willing to work hard to minimise all the ways in which they aren’t [part of the subset of] men” even if you didn’t intend it to and even if you didn’t want it to.

Code Anthem isn’t, as far as I can tell, thinking about Open Source paid jobs in that post, but they of course have this problem magnified. It seems vastly reasonable on the face of it: hiring existing Open Source contributors, ideally people from your very own community, means you hire people who are well-versed in the particular mode of development you do, in particular, the use of text-based mediums for communicating among a distributed team. Since Open Source (or more to the point Free Software) projects are at least sometimes associated with particular non-commercial goals and philosophies agreement with those seems desirable. But since most long-term Open Source developers need to be paid for it, it strongly feeds into this cycle of long-term Open Source developers continuing to be male and of a particular kind of culture, and continuing to overtly or subtly signal that that’s who is welcome in Open Source development.

A woman can be an honorary guy, sure, with all the perquisites and privileges pertaining to that statusâ€”as long as she never lets anything disturb the guy faÃ§ade.

Itâ€™s good to be an honorary guy, donâ€™t get me wrong. Guys are fun to be around. Guys know stuff. Guys help out other guys. Guys trust other guys. And in my experience, they donâ€™t treat honorary guys any differently from how they treat regular guys. Itâ€™s really great to be an honorary guy.

The only problem is that part of the way that guys distinguish themselves from not-guys is by contrasting themselves with women.

The Women of Vision Awards Banquet is on May 12, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. This banquet honors women making significant contributions to technology. One winner is selected in each category: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact. (Details and directions at the link.)

(trigger warnings) David Lisak’s work on the modus operandi of man-attacks-woman acquaintance rapists is discussed again at Feministe and Fugitivus. As Harriet writes: “I guess itâ€™s good and depressing news. You can identify rapists, is the good news, and itâ€™s exactly who you thought it was is the depressing.”

Sungold loves the feminist blogging explosion, but wants to explain that the recent history of feminism includes many forums and individuals who were interested in the same issues for decades prior. (Via FWD.)

Do You Come with the Car?: A blog by a New York auto model. Because so many of us can relate to the tribulations of the Booth Babe :)

Shakesville: Happy Ada Lovelace Day: Telling Our Stories: ‘Still, when I got to college my assigned advisor said at our first meeting, "What are you going to do with a degree in neuroscienceâ€”teach high school biology?"… I questioned one of my male classmates who stayed with that first guy: "What did he ask at your first meeting?" "Oh, you know: 'where do you see yourself in five years? Ten?'"’

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if youâ€™re a delicious user, tag them â€œgeekfeminismâ€ to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart. Newsweek describes Lise Eliot’s book Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gapsâ€”And What We Can Do About It, in which she reviews evidence that parents cause the differences in infant behaviour that some people claim is innate.

laughingrat on Impostors: “I wonder if, for instance, my college adviser would have been able to get away with pretending I was too stupid for graduate school–he said as much to me in a slightly gentled-up fashion–if I hadn’t myself learned to be so self-deprecating.”

FemaleScienceProfessor asks people to start seeing micro-inequities, those little niggling incidents that are so easily written off as probably not sexist, just someone having a bad day, or being a jerk.

Greta Christina discusses sexism and racism in the skeptical and atheist communities, and about how being white and male-dominated will perpetrate itself in unhelpful ways. There is some overlap between these communities and geekdom, so it isn’t surprising to hear that some of the defensiveness is similar.